NOTE: This review was originally posted in 2008

For anyone living in a household with at least one non-techie in residence, a universal remote can solve the problem of messed up settings on home theatre components, misplaced remotes and ….well, family disharmony.

That’s probably the drive behind Logitech naming its universal remote series “Harmony”. The mouse-maker seems to be surprisingly alone in the arena of mid-priced remotes. There certainly is not a shortage of budget-priced units by other manufactureres that work by “learning” the codes by infrared signals from your current remotes, but have little or no capability to memorize favourite settings.

Our Harmony 550, however, excels at learning a setup. There are two aspects of this device that are particularly attractive: its “activity”-based functions and programming of equipment codes via Logitech’s website rather than learning by infrared. As long as you have a computer with Internet access and a USB port, programming is dead easy.

So what is meant by an activity? With individual remotes, if you wanted to watch TV on your satellite box, you would probably do the following:

• Turn on the TV with its remote and make sure the right input was selected.
• Turn on the A/V receiver with its remote, select the input corresponding to the satellite box, and set the volume as needed.
• Turn on the satellite box with its remote and select the channel. You might also adjust the aspect ratio to fit the widescreen TV format.

Now, you’re finished with TV and want to chill with a CD.

• You turn off the TV with its remote.
• Ditto for the satellite box.
• Change the A/V receiver input to CD or DVD with its remote.
• Turn on the CD/DVD player with its remote, throw in the disc, and choose a track (or just hit Play) with the same remote.

What just happened here? We accomplished two activities (Watch TV and Listen to CD) with a lot of button pushing and four separate remotes. With the Harmony 550, we need only push one button to do all the actions in our first list, and one other button to do the second. To access these “activities” you push only one other button first: the Activities button right at the top of the unit (where you can easily find it). The activities are then listed on the 550’s LCD display.

So how do you get your equipment codes into the remote? Rather than have it learn codes from each remote via infrared (although it will do that too in a pinch), using Logitech’s software, you simply log on to their website and select the make and model of each component in your home theatre. All of the features you have on your component’s remote are now loaded into the 550 via the USB port. And, Logitech claims to have more than 175,000 models from more than 5,000 manufacturers in its database.

On the same website, you can set up new activities (the 550 allows up to 12) by telling it which components you want turned on, and how to configure the inputs for each. If you get it wrong, you can always log in and change the settings later. Your settings are stored on Logitech’s servers, so you can always retrieve them if something happens to the 550.

Once you’re into an activity, say Watch a DVD, the 550’s clearly marked buttons control the player the way your DVD’s remote would. Switch to Play VCR, and the buttons revert to VCR control buttons. Similarly, the Guide and Info buttons control those functions the same way our satellite box remote did.

If the activity you chose doesn’t seem to work properly, hit the Help button and it asks you Yes/No questions until it gets it working. If you want to tweak the setup further, hit the Device button, and you get access to all the functions that your original remote provided (just make sure the non-techies in your household don’t get into this one).

One thing that puzzles us is the availability of a button labelled “Sound” and another labelled “Picture”. We assumed that these could be programmed to switch between surround and stereo sound on the A/V receiver, and 16:9 and 4:3 formats on the TV. So we clicked the “Customize Buttons” bar on our Watch TV setup on the website. This mode allows you to assign functions to any button on the remote, except, apparently, for the Picture and Sound buttons. Instead, we used the A and B buttons for these functions. We’re still in the dark as to what the Picture and Sound buttons do! The manual was no help on this, and in fact we note that the manual is a little out of date in that it doesn’t show the current website interface.

One odd thing about the setup using Logitech’s website. For us Canadian customers, it lists the Bell Express Vu 6100 satellite receiver, but tells you that it won’t work with the 550. At first we thought it had something to do with the fact that the 6100 remote uses a UHF link in addition to an an infrared one. We ignored the warning, and were delighted that it works just fine anyway.

The 550 is amazingly thin (but a little fatter around the battery compartment). One or two minor complaints: the numeric keypad buttons may be a little small for some fat fingers, and the blue backlight on the display doesn’t make for easy reading of black characters against it. One interesting feature: if you don’t move the remote for two hours then touch it, a motion sensor inside it turns on the display and button backlights so that you can see what you’re doing.

Despite minor anomalies with the setup, we are impressed with the breadth of Logitech’s database and the easy setup question/answer format on its website. We were skeptical at first that we would still have to lean on our old remotes for the odd function, but the 550 seems to have everything covered.

The Harmony 550 lists for about $140 in Canada, but can frequently be found on sale for $100. At either price point, in our opinion this unit is great value for money.